If you think that baseball is nothing but a quant game where logic always prevails, you need look no further than R.A. Dickey, the Mets' ace knuckleballer who won the National League Cy Young today.

There’s a simple truth behind Moneyball: the guys who look like ballplayers aren’t always ballplayers and vice versa. Oakland GM Billy Beane, once a stud prospect for the Mets who looked the part but couldn’t hit the breaking ball, was that guy. Dickey, like every other knuckleballer in history, is the vice versa.

Dickey is the most improbable Cy Young award winner ever. A 38-year-old 20-game winner on a last-place team. And, of course, the first knuckleballer. He’s the diametric opposite of AL Cy Young Award winner David Price, a hard-throwing lefty, who was drafted first overall in the 2007 draft by the stat heads who run the Tampa Bay Rays.

Dickey? He too was a high first-round pick, in 1996, but an abnormality in his elbow raised red flags, and the Texas Rangers rescinded their offer. Dickey bounced around the minors for a decade and a half and only two years ago had the ignominious distinction of being the first player cut by the Mets in spring training. Like most other knuckleballers, he got his chance only because the manager had no choice.

Why do scouts and managers and GMs hate knuckleballers? Because they’re unpredictable. No one, not even Dickey, knows where his next pitch is going to go. Contrast that with Price, who can hit a gnat on the inside corner with a 98 mph fastball. For a baseball guy, that kind of consistency is even better than Mylanta.

But baseball isn’t just a game of the next pitch. It’s true that Dickey’s next pitch may be at the mercy of the wind—literally. But overall, his performance is no fluke.

Dickey finished second in the NL in ERA (2.73) and third in walks and hits per inning (1.05) on his way to becoming the first Met in a generation to win 20 games—and the first since Dwight Gooden to win the Cy Young. Dickey’s dancing pitches may be uncatchable, but they’re also virtually unhittable.

For the moment at least, Dickey is getting paid based on perception rather than performance, and that disconnect is one of the reasons his $4.25 million salary makes him one of baseball's biggest bargains. And one of the few underpaid Mets stars in the history of this spendthrift franchise. Moneyball, indeed.

Look at history, where knuckleballers like Phil Neikro and Tim Wakefield pitched effectively well into their 40s and prodigious flamethrowers (like Gooden among many others) are often find themselves rehabbing shoulders or elbows at age 30, and there’s every reason to think that Dickey has as much chance to be pitching effectively ten years from now as Price.

Rifle through Baseball-Reference and you’ll see that, given the chance, knuckleballers can do the job: There have been only about 85 knuckleballers in the history of baseball. And yet 12 of them have won more than 100 games, 10 won more than 150 games, and seven won over 200 games. Four knuckleballers even made the Hall of Fame. And Dickey, with 61 wins, has a decent chance to add to those totals. You'd think some stat geek working for a pitching starved franchise would latch onto a trend like that.

And yet, in a game where imitation is as ubiquitous as sunflower seeds in the dugout, Dickey remains the only knuckleball pitcher in baseball. In a game where stats have wiped out most prejudices, it’ll probably take more than one Cy Young to overcome the anti-knuckleball bias.